Friday, May 30, 2008

New fibro support forum (UK)

There is a new fibromyalgia support forum for UK.

http://www.fibro.org.uk/

Hope this forum flies. Good luck. UK patients will need all the info/help in getting help from the NHS system, and understanding their rights.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A fogged moment!

It was just another day at work. My manager was going to go through with me how data could be analysed with a new software.

The alarm bells started to rang when I realised I had "blank" moments about what she said 5 seconds ago. Therefore, I tried to write down "notes", so that I could refer to it when I became blank again. I tried my best to listen, asked questions, get confirmation, and write down immediately, but there were still so many missing "gaps". It was horrible. I was so worried that I might be "found out". She must have thought that it was weird for me to write down every single instruction she gave!

The acid test happened when she asked me to give it a go-enter some data and tried a new analyses. Good grief!! So many mistakes. I could only joke about hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar and hoped that she would half believe it. When the session was over, I immediately declared lunch and hoped that the brain fog would go away!! Thankfully, I was much better after lunch.

That was a really narrow escape. I have some RA symptoms recently, swellings in the morning, and I guess the fog was part of the package. Wish me luck!!!!

Research- Fatigue(felt) related to heart functioning!

A new research published in the very respectable annals of internal Medicine showed that fatigue is related to cardiac functioning yesterday.

Basically, it showed that the amount of blood pumped out by the heart is lower among individuals with high reported fatigue, both at rest and in response to stress compared to low or moderate fatigue people.

The authors concluded:
"This study demonstrates that fatigue complaints may have hemodynamic correlates even in ostensibly healthy individuals".

Those were just nice and intellectual sounding stuff which means:
"There is some sort of link between the heart and blood dynamics in people who said they are fatigued! It is not all in the mind!"
I cant blame any ME, CFS or RA patients who have deal with fatigue almost on a daily basis feeling vindicated. I did!
















Exercise made 1/3 of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients feel worse..

Saw the report about exercises prescribed for CFS patients made 1/3 of them felt worse, and resulted in some of them to be bed bound for the next couple of days.

I certainly feel a lot worse after a "good work out". The kind of fatigue and soreness, the flares in my joints I experience is not just plain after excercise sort of tiredness. I make no mistake about that. The jury is still really out there about how much is too much and how much is enough. Until then, we just got to listen to out body and get up and do as much as we possibly could. Exercises and activities, is definitely a good thing, but the amount required is really depending on the individual. That stays, until some solid research have came out we good data.

At the same time, some researchers had worked out that people who complained of high "fatigue" has hemodynamic differences compared to those arent (when they looked into the blood flow and pressure)